Nearly half a million pensioners will be forced to pay tax on small private pensions because of mistakes made by the Treasury.

The government likes to propagate the myth that 'tax credits encourage work'. Even ignoring the half of tax credit payments that goes towards encouraging/subsidising unemployed single mothers or is lost to fraud and error, Rab C Nesbitt provides anecdotal but reliable evidence that tax credits discourage work. I explained why in the comments to his post.

Half a trillion pounds of taxpayers' money so that no one too rich to have to pay tax has to right off a Christmas. What about those who have already had to do so, having paid tax even on their very low pay, or their pensions (oh, yes - that's why tax increases are NI but tax cuts are income tax), or their benefits (oh, yes, again)? Is it because they don't need half a trillion pounds? Or is it ju...

Welcome to our daily web review. As always, feel free to share your own recommendations in the comments. Clairwil - The first step to ending poverty is scrapping tax-credits, that most convoluted and expensive waste of resources. The lowest paid shouldn't pay any tax whatsoever. Dave Hill - Some choice cuts from the list of questions

Following the previous post on the nonsense that is tax credits, a contact points out that not only are they unworkable, they offer huge scope for easy fraud. This is because they require timely notification of a vast amount of personal information to a central point which in practice is uncheckable.For instanceSome changes in circumstance mean that your tax credit payments will go down, for examp...

The central member of a gang who stole more than £3m of tax credits has been jailed for five years, following an international investigation by HMRC. Tax credits are wide open to fraud. Lithuanian Ricardas Virokaitis was the linchpin of a gang who paid Eastern European women to come to the UK solely to register for benefits and tax credits. Virokaitis and his criminal colleagues escorted the...

From Hansard this Thursday:Low Income HouseholdsSir Peter Viggers: To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer what estimate he has made of the amount of tax paid by low income households in the last 12 months.Jane Kennedy: A single earner family with two children on half male average earnings pays no net tax in 2008-09, as tax credits and child benefit more than offset income tax and national insuranc...

Last month 10,000 people came to the End Child Poverty rally in Trafalgar square to urge the government to keep the promise to halve child poverty by 2010; the key measure we were demanding was an extra £3 billion in tax credits and benefits for children. Did today’s pre-budget report move us...

Britain's tax authorities are seeking to play down the impact of an accidental release of personal details, including salary information, of up to 50,000 recipients of tax credits

David LawsHalf of children living in poverty are not entitled to free school meals, research by the Liberal Democrats has revealed. Parliamentary answers have shown that free meals are available to children whose parents are on a variety of benefits, but not to those who claim working tax credits. The information shows that: Families are paying over £300 on average per child, per year, f...